Deaf and dumb and at the pinnacle of varsity career

• The disease made him completely deaf and also robbed him of his speech ability.
• His appointment at Moi University made him the first deaf lecturer in Kenya.
• In the US, life took another turn for the better; for the first time in his life, he was given an interpreter

Luckily for him, his teachers and classmates accepted his condition and did all they could to make sure he did not fall behind in his studies.

“Although they had no training of how to handle children with disabilities, my teachers always encouraged me to pursue education,” says the fourth-born of eight children.

“They would write a lot on the blackboard just for my sake. My peers too would give me their notes to read and assisted me where they could.”

The youngster was a bright pupil. In 1968, he sat his Certificate of Primary Education examination and passed highly.

Unfortunately, he was forced to stay home for a year, unable to proceed with to secondary school because the schools did not know what to do with him. 

“Many people never thought that a deaf person could actually continue with education to high school level. They had never seen any before and so they concluded that I was just joking around. No-one was willing to give me a chance,” he recounts.

After unsuccessfully looking for a suitable school for a year, the teenager was introduced to Dr Lowry and Ruth Mallory when he was 18.

Dr Mallory was the headmaster of Nyeri Baptist, a small Christian secondary school in Nyeri. He was asked by an education officer to accept Ndurumo as a student in June 1970.

In 1971, he moved to St Peters Mumias High to be close to the school for the deaf. In the same year, he went to Harrison-Chilhowee Baptist Academy in Tennessee, USA, becoming the institution’s first foreign student.

This arrangement was made by Dr Mallory who had noted his exceptional academic abilities while at Nyeri Baptist.

In the US, life took another turn for the better for Ndurumo; for the first time in his life, he was given an interpreter to accompany him to class and was therefore forced to learn sign language.

Previously, he had been communicating by writing notes. Telling of his academic brilliance and indefatigable spirit, Ndurumo went on to complete two years of high school in a year.

Furthermore, he taught himself English by reading the dictionary since the disease struck him even before he had learnt the language.

“I was mesmerised by the structure of the English language and had to learn it through all effort,” he says.

In 1974, he joined Gallaudet University in Washington where he took general studies, including psychology, a field he was to specialise in later in life.